It's been another day to cut myself with the glints of light on broken glass. What is it, a story of happiness? That would be very boring and you are going to hate me for that. Whoever wants to write a book, whoever wants to become a writer: I can show you the road to hell. Kiss me Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ*I learned to type the butterfly from Holly Blue, I copy & paste actually. From now on I'm going to use it as my Zorro fancy cuts. Thank you.

Good Alice, I completely forgot the man was dead, but I completely forgot he was born! Last week 157 years ago. But I didn't forget these words he wrote: "An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all." This is a page to collect kisses. So! I HAVE to get him here after all. Find my lips on his gravestone in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris. Of course it's vandalism, of course it's silly. But he is my champion, and I can't resist a fag. I know, I'm going to be punished for my "scarlet death".

Lectori Salutem,If you have been follwing this blog and if you by any chance have got the funny idea that my upcoming novel is a syrupy romance flavoured with the necessary cute, sticky tears you are kind of looking forward to for your beach vacation. To begin with, BUTTERFLY is about war. One thing I know of war is that it has more to do with hate than with love. So to be clear, mine is a hate story that, by many contortions -- dramatic bendings include intense teamwork of the protagonists and their vigorous and painful twistings and flexings -- ends up with likely sweet sunshine. Art, literature portrays darkness and provides hope, that's the difference between artistry and life. But what would you do as an author to find out that your explored subject has exactly zero significance to your audience, not because what you are writing about is not significant. They blame you because they are unfamilair with it. Unfamiliarity breeds ignorance, ignorance breeds contempt. Being a novelist of a certain, if not obscure, origin, I'm writing in a language that is not my mother tongue, about lesser-known presidents, superheroes and serial killers, and if I'm lucky you will tell me you care. As I'm juggling with the English vocabulary, I'm serving up tastes of my own concoction; a not everyday salad dish which I hope would be as delightful and flavoursome as Nabokov, and which at the same time would crease quite a few pedant foreheads myopic and dreadfully pure as medieval mould could be. Bon!

Moving on, I am obliged to turn this suicide mission I have already started into "mission possible", I accept 0 is my starting point. Now pay attention, show me you are worth my fooldom. Something most people forget. The Second World War started in Asia. Troubled by a long term economic depression, Japan’s military regime sought a solution and found a problem. The goal and deluding oxygen was to subjugate China in order to propel the country into a false future of expansionism and imperialism. In 1931 the Emperor, Tenno Hiroshito bypassed the parliamentary procedure and gave direct order to the Japanese Imperial Army to invade Manchuria. However, Japan would still wait until July 1937, when the carefully staged Marco Polo Bridge Incident took place near Beiping. The Empire of the Sun officially declared war against China and the rest of the world. In November the Imperial Army took Shanghai. One month later, Nanking, the then Chinese capital was abandoned by Chiang Kai-shek and his government. Butterfly, my novel starts from this point in time. The Massacre of Nanking — also known as The Rape of Nanking — the "forgotten Holocaust" of a globally fought war. Bering a novelist is sometimes being a synonym to sadist. In fact I find these are perfect circumstances to examine something like "human nature", and our universal capability to do bad things to another human being. BUTTERFLY takes place in the 30s/40s of the twentieth century. One summer day, she meets him on the bending shore of the magic, eternal river Yangtze. She is a married Chinese woman in her forties, he is a young Japanese soldier. They find out they are each other's blood enemy. In this extreme situation, the questions are: can love be love, or is love a political choice? Is love enough to save a human being? How far would one go to love?The Rape of Nanking eventually cost between 200,000 and 300,000 lives – more than the death tolls of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined – which says nothing of the nonlethal atrocities visited upon the city’s population.Each time when I provided my audience the above, bolded information at a pre-publication reading session, it was not them but me who dropped my jaw. Without batting an eyelid, they tell me they have never heard of it! Suddenly I felt so helpless and naked, this time it's not by my own choice.

She touched her lips to the hollow and felt the grainy, wet coolness. The statue didn’t bear a name on its base, neither was she able to make anything out of it. She named the marble figurine Memory. Standing in the rain, she searched the moss-green crisscross of age and decay crawling all over the white surface, counting the countless, thin cracks, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. The stitches dug in and out of the flesh of the crumbling stone, torn and twisted lines that sew broken lives together. It was one day before she went back home, Xanadu, the city of the eternal spring – her first visit since she left a long time ago.She telephoned him immediately after she had landed. ‘Let’s meet,’ she said.‘Where?’‘Sweet Corner Café.’She hung up without any more explanation: without any expectation. Or perhaps she was expecting something. She wanted him to tell her the stories; stories that heal.

Dusk threw off the pale blue tone and coloured the city in soft longing pink. She decided to take a walk through the place she grew up. Silent, sleepy houses lining up the streets, staring faces from the past. For the first time she realised why she felt attached to the featureless sculpture on the square she had kissed in the rain as if to pay pilgrimage. Memory is like these houses that have been there since time immemorial, they are not communicative, neither do they help you to forget. It would be merciful to tear them down, but she would lose herself and become effaced. She would lose good dreams and bad dreams she dreamed, in which she tasted life’s delirium.Following the familiar curve of the road, she took a deep breath from the air laced with something that made her heart go wild, something like an unsigned love letter. Smoky foliage of the Wutong trees brought back long lost summers. Fluffy propellers of flowers in purple and lilac blowing from the hand-shaped leaves. Laughter of the children dwindling in the damp meadows like fading scents. They were part of her joy, and her pain.

The contour of the glasshouse came into view, buried behind the first neon signs, a dazzling gem in the last sun. She halted a minute before she carried on, almost running and stepping inside the empty and quiet space. It was still early, a few clients scattered around the corners of the café and along the bar. Taking a seat near the window, she ordered noodles. It came immediately. She was not hungry. Jetlag had ruined her appetite but the ritual of eating will help her kill time and calm her nerves, she reasoned while poking her chopsticks in the red chilly soy bean sauce sprinkled with rings of green onion. It was her favourite dish, the venue was the only place in the city where they prepared a good stock pot with real chickens from real farmers. In fact, all she found here had tints of a photo from decades ago, ephemeral sepia, completely vague yet expressing everything and nothing.Someone called her name. She quickly turned her head to find the bartending girl smiling at her. A zooming vibrated through her ears into her head. ‘It’s you, Little Army! Why I didn’t expect…’You should! What were you thinking! This was the place they often visited together after the school. It was long before the greenhouse cum aviary was turned into this trendy establishment. In the afternoon people would find two girls crossing the network of the city’s dusty lanes, darting through traffic. Hand in hand, chattering like two little lovebirds, the girls made a roundabout to the glasshouse to look at the peacocks. A white one and a bluish green one formed a couple. But then, when one day the third peacock was brought to the aviary to join them, something happened. The bird keeper told the girls that the swellheads were destroying each other’s eggs. Now that the trust was damaged, he said, he no longer could keep any of them together so he had to sell them. The peacocks were the last inhabitants of the aviary. After some years of negligence, the piece of ground was sold to a proprietor from Hong Kong who made a business out of revamping the antique orangery. He didn’t let it be demolished as happened to many old buildings in the city.

She stood up from the table, took a few uncertain steps forwards and stopped. The two of them looked at each other from a distance not too far and not too close. ‘I heard you are back. How are things these days? Let me guess. You came back to Xanadu to have a bowl of noodles.’ ‘The dish alone is worth a trip, I agree. You haven’t changed a bit. Your cap...’ She made a confused gesture. The Little Army she knew used to wear a green army cap, under which two girly braids played peek-a-boo in a windswept, dark lustrous bush. Whereas the piece of clothing might cause offence even aversion to some people today, it gave the girl an incrediblysexy look in her memory. She still had the same eyes she had known since their childhood. The girl with whom she sang dirty songs they cooked up, with whom she played all kinds of games – dangerous games kids play.After finishing school, the girls would hide themselves in the mountains made of shreds of paper. Their parents worked at the paper factory where they shredded books to make paper pulp. Forbidden books which they devoured, burying their little faces in the printed pages, impatiently and graspingly relishing the golden honey words trickling down the sentences that become whole passages. The books would disappear in the machine in a short while, they must hurry. When they were not reading, they went over the scenes taken directly from the stories. Love making scenes that thrilled and engaged the two of them. Sweet fruits they tasted like they never tasted before. The girls were in love without their knowing, for love was a word beyond their comprehension as well as the scenes they rehearsed, touching and kissing each other. They were the innocent explorers in their obsessive, frenzied game, hungry for the unknown. Hours and hours rolled away as they hid themselves from the world, romping in the landscape of shredded paper, stirring up the tender inferno that kindled their spotless apple cheeks and itched their young veins; a fire they played with, bright, strong, undefined yet unwavering. They had wandered, without rule or guidance, into a moral wilderness of their newly discovered paradise, where they roamed as freely as untamed Pocahontas in her woods. The forbidden words were their passport into regions where other children dared not tread. They had taught each other passion without purpose. Longings, joy, and shame – they had learned shame.‘May I join you? You are waiting for someone?’‘I still have time. Please sit down for a while.’ They sat down with the bowl of noodles between theirfaces. Since they parted this was the first time they spoke to each other. She pictured how Little Army would look now, undressed, her girly braids shining dark and lustrous on her white, naked shoulders – she had explored them with her lips and fingers, she knew every intimate arc and bend of her anatomy. The braids were not there anymore. Instead, the girl in front of her had a short haircut, all layered and tomboyish that accentuated her effortless beauty.‘Famous Hair & Loss. Try it. You look like a long hair fetishist hippie biker…He is back…I think he knew you were coming to Xanadu…’Jun, their first boyfriend, whom they had shared. It was a boundless, fearless friendship in which they shared everything.‘You two got married. My parents sent me the news.’‘We did. After we heard you left. You didn’t say goodbye.’ ‘I didn’t know myself. I mean…OK, you are right. I ran away because I got afraid. Then I got angry with myself. I wanted to vanish.’‘It was a simple wedding. We went to the city hall and signed the booklets. Two days later he left, and I stayed. I can’t imagine myself living elsewhere. This is the city of the eternal spring, our eternal spring.’‘I know. Shame is the desert of adulthood that makes you die of thirst in the end.’‘I can’t believe we’ve been living like this for ten years! Sometimes I think it’s too much. We can’t be together for reasons we can’t explain. He travels around the country, working as a photographer for foreign magazines. Once in a while he would turn up, just like that, and we would make love and have an amazing time together...He misses you. We miss you. It was perfect.’‘It was paradise, but the purpose of life is losing paradise.’She had wanted to say our failure, our fault, is not in the passions we have, but in our lack of control of them.Their triangle had lasted forever. The children had grown older and vain. She couldn’t get enough of him. Even though he was with her. Her heart skipped a beat when she heard his voice saying her name. Those gold-gilded brown eyes put her in a trance. The reminiscence of his mouth did lose its colour over the years but not its magic that would send a shiver up her body, which made her heart ache in her dream. It was a pain close to homesickness, and to make up for her nostalgia, she would pick up any guy she met at a bar and go home with him. She wanted to tell her that this was how she had lived the years abroad. She had promised herself she will stay no matter what he put her through and she will never leave. But in the end she was the killjoy. One day she got on a plane and left them both behind, left them both trapped in the past. ‘I wish we had never grown up. I died inside a little more each time you replaced me. Now I said it. It’s the truth, Little Army.’‘He can’t love you like I can.’ ‘Yet I can’t be what he needs as long as he needs you.’‘How did it happen? It was our game, the two of us are supposed to make the rules! We end up he owns both our heart – ’‘And believe me, there are strings attached to my heart, and some day if he pull on those, I’d just come running. That’s how I realised it’s impossible. I love you, but I love him more. There is a dream I dreamed in those days. We were together, playing dangerous games we played, walking on a tight rope between two soaring towers, parallel; the past and the future, they never meet. You were the only one who danced and sang in my dream. You are the stronger one of us…Little Army…’ She reached out across the table to hold the girl’s face in both her hands, touching her warm, sad mouth.‘Don’t worry, I won’t be seeing him. I betrayed you once, my friend, but this time I pledge allegiance to the flag.’ She made a solemn hand gesture. They burst out laughing.‘I see your date has arrived – I’m behind the bar if you need anything – ’A frozen posture stood in the door, silhouetted by the streetlight streaming in to blind her eyes. For a moment she fancied herself in a Batman movie, and she had returned to a shattered Gotham City.‘Uncle Cho!’ She cried out over the noisy music, waving. The warrior figure moved towards her. Now they could see each other’s eyes. He looked older, much older than she would want to know. He was her Dragon King, the storyteller from the city of the eternal spring where people stay young forever.

He was a mechanic from the paper factory, an apprentice of her father’s. In the weekend her mother would invite the young man to their house to have dinner with the family. He lived alone. Rumours had it he worked at the opera house before he lost his job in the turbulent years of political tug o’war. He was a minstrel. After the dinner, everybody gathered around him to listen to the stories he told. Back then no-one had heard of television let alone to own one. Dragon King was his nickname, after his central character, but also because of the jets of words he composed, off the cuff, on the spur of the moment, shaping them to a fabulous shining fountain forever watering the land of imagination – like the Dragon his rain.

‘Dragon King, I waited for you,’ she greeted the shadow that had taken a seat at the table. She was not sure if it was the dimmed lighting, or was it a trick of her memory? Everything about him looked diffuse, as if she was looking through a camera out of focus. ‘Eat,’ the Dragon King said in a soft, deep voice, pushing the noodle dish in front of her. ‘A cold dish causes less suffering than a cold thought.’‘I’m not hungry, Uncle Cho. I phoned you because…’‘I knew. I have been waiting all these years for your phone call from the past. Which story?’‘The one you never told us. How did the Dragon King arrive in Xanadu, the city of the eternal spring?’‘So you want to hear the story of Sweet Corner Café? You have thought about it, haven’t you? That’s why we are here. Which version do you want to hear, the painful one or the less painful one?’‘The real one.’‘All right then. Here comes my last story, about the beginning.’ How long has he been travelling, the Dragon King asked himself. He lost the count of years. He felt hungry, tired and lonely, on the brink to give up his searching all together. Then, quite unexpectedly, his eyes spotted something on the horizon, like a dimple of a smile, a muted face on an aged, yellow photo. Xanadu? His heart missed a beat. It was the name he gave to his first kite he made as a child. The one he lost to possibilities when the cord broke. After that he never made a kite again. He was convinced he would never be able to make one that could beat the wind and fly so high to the blue of the sky. He decided he wanted to find it, Xanadu. When he grew old enough, he set off on an endless journey, rummaging around places. Everywhere he went, he brought rain and stories about his brave quest. His eyes caught something on the horizon, like a dimple of a smile. He hurried his pace to arrive before the dark, and when he did, there was no kite out there at all. Instead he found a city! And there in front of him stood an abandoned glasshouse with many of its panes smashed or missing. He pushed open the door on rusty hinges to discover a secret garden inside. The sun filtered through fractured glass, rejuvenating the scarred cacti and tropical flowers. The Dragon King didn’t wait a moment longer to change the place and make it his new home. Ever since he was a child he had wanted to become a gardener one day, creating with his own hands a habitat where it’s always spring and children don’t grow up. He planted rare trees and plants which he irrigated with rainbow rain to make the greenery last. He brought back birds from distant mountains and seas. He turned his glasshouse into a chirping miracle amidst the city where children gathered, to whom he gave tea and cake while he told them stories about people and things he had seen on the road, about a man’s quest for a dream. However, the children didn’t know that the Dragon King was not to be trusted, that he was a man of grisly plans. After the children left his “paradise” – that was how they called his secret garden – deep in the night, a warrior figure would be spotted roaming through the streets, waving a sword in his hand. The Dragon King looked for the children of the city. He crawled through the windows to find them one by one, fast asleep in their own bed. He took out his sword to cut in their limbs. He sliced off exactly the size that had grown since he last saw them. Then he sewed the skin back and sewed the wounds. He spewed rainbow rain on the lesion to make it heal fast so no one would notice. Along with the cutting he had also removed the children’s memory with his magic blade. A brain surgeon who worked at the municipal hospital did discover the curious, seamless stitches in the head of his seven-year-old son, but since the boy seemed ever happier, he didn’t pursue the subject. Other people, the observant ones from the city who noticed that the children had stopped growing never mentioned it either, because they remembered their wish from a long time ago to stay children forever. The café was crammed with men and women in party mood, more people poured in around midnight. Lonesome nighthawks. She said goodbye to the Dragon King on the pavement, watching his back dissolving to the edge of the night. It had rained, water gathered on the side of the road, mirroring an inverted city. In the puddle under her feet the neon sign echoed, twice “Sweet Corner”. A cold damp breeze chilled her tear-soaked face, ruffling the colourful graphs to broken curves. From a karaoke bar a line of text entered her ears: …May I kiss you, in shattered memories…